Yesterday, Nvidia took the wraps off its high-end GP100 GPU and gave us a look at what its top-end HPC configuration would look like come Q1 2017.If you’re thinking about using some of your tax rebate on a new GPU or just eyeing the market in general, we’d recommend waiting at least a few more months before pulling the trigger.

It’s no secret that AMD and Nvidia are planning to launch new GPUs in the next few months, but there are still questions about configurations and technology.Initially, we expected these new cards to use the HBM2 memory standard, but the persistent rumor has been that AMD’s upcoming Polaris would be GDDR5 based.

While the GTX 1080 isn’t scheduled to launch until May 27, Nvidia has lifted the curtain on the GPUs performance and technical advances.The GTX 1080 packs 25% more cores and 25% more texture units than the GTX 980 it replaces, along with a much higher base clock (1.

Last week, Futuremark released Time Spy, a new DirectX 12 benchmark that takes full advantage of DX12’s features and capabilities, including asynchronous compute.Much of the confusion on this topic is related to what Time Spy tests and how it implements support for asynchronous compute in DirectX 12.

That’s gone at the top end — even when the Fury X manages to trade shots with the GTX 1080, Nvidia’s Titan X obliterates them both by 20-40%.If you want the absolute best GPU performance money can buy, the Nvidia Titan X is the best GPU on the market.

Today, AMD formally launched its new RX 470, the slimmed-down little brother of the larger RX 480.An RX 470 that offers 95% of RX 480 performance in a smaller power envelope and for $20 less is a winning deal; an RX 470 at 85% of RX 480 performance and $20 less isn’t as compelling.

Polaris would arrive in mid-2016, while Vega, the company’s big GPU follow-up, would slip in at the end of the year.At its Sonoma event in December 2015, AMD implied it would launch a larger variant of Polaris first, followed by a brand-new architecture, Vega, later in the year.

There’s a new set of rumors cropping up about AMD’s Vega.That works out to up to 1TB/s of memory bandwidth for a full implementation — and the first-generation HBM implementations that AMD shipped were full implementations.